Cemara's Family

Abah is a building contractor with a good life. His partner's fraud takes the house, the car and the business in one night. The family leaves Jakarta for a wooden house in Bogor left by their grandparents. Abah starts driving a minibus, Emak cooks and sells food from the house, Euis, in secondary school, is furious at having lost her old life, and small Ara minds none of it. Yandy Laurens directs, with Ringgo Agus Rahman, Nirina Zubir, Zara and Widuri Putri Sasono. The source is Arswendo Atmowiloto's Keluarga Cemara, first a comic and then, in 1996, a much loved television series. A generation grew up with this family, and the film is built on that memory. What it does is treat becoming poor not as a catastrophe but as a daily process of adjustment. There is little dramatic event; the story runs on rent, school fees, a birthday cake and food that does not sell. It opened on 3 January 2019, drew close to 1.7 million admissions and was the seventh most watched film of the year. It won widely, including at the Piala Citra and Piala Maya. A sequel followed in 2022 and then a series. Who it is for: viewers who like family films and Indonesian popular cinema. Who it is not for: the emotional register is soft in places and the conflicts resolve quickly, and without the series some scenes will read as ordinary.